kareina

Today in Italian class the lesson was focused on food-words and menus in Restaurants. They also touched on the cost of eating in a restaurant. The teacher commented that a restaurant which charges 200 Euros for a meal is quite expensive, but one which charges 30 is a fairly typical moderately priced restaurant. This number sounded a bit steep to me, who prefers to eat at home. so I opened up Quicken and subtracted the total amount I've spent on groceries since moving to Milan (651.33) by the number of days which have elapsed since moving here (112), and discovered that I'm spending less than 6 Euros a day on food (keep in mind that my pantry is well stocked, so I could live quite a number of days on what is in the house now). Then I thought about it, realized that I've been feeding Crian, too. So I counted up the total number of days he's been here (83, on three different occasions thus far) and determined that per person we are spending only 3.34 Euors a day on food, or about 1/10 of what my Italian teacher considers a reasonable price in a Restaurant. Granted, that price includes the Antipasto, Primo, Secondo, Contorno, and Desert; in other words, more food in one sitting than I typically eat all day long. Yet another reason to prefer my own cooking! Not only do I get what I want, when I want it, with total control over all ingredients, it costs a fraction of the price of restaurant food. Add to that my quirks like not eating anything containing wine or vinegar, my disinclination to eat meat (given my digestive tract's reaction to it), not caring for standard vegetarian staples like mushrooms, capsicum, or chocolate, preferring real butter to any form of vegetable fat, etc., not liking to eat in the evenings, but being hungry every 1-2 hours during the morning and afternoon, and it is ever so much easier to just feed myself.

Today after Italian class Crian and I met up with some new friends of ours. He's a couchsurfer who saw my ad for Medieval/Renaissance dance practice and thought it would be fun. He attended last week, and enjoyed it. Since it couldn't happen this week due to the hosts being scheduled to receive the rest of their boxes from the US today, we decided to meet for a meal instead. We met up in a park near my class, thinking we'd do a picnic. But it was kind of cold out (especially to his girlfriend, who is from the south of Italy), and getting darkish, so instead we walked to a supermarket and back to our house, where I cooked up a quick spinach/ricotta/garlic sauce and made homemade eggs noodles and Crian baked a Shepard's pie using the last of the left over cheesy mashed potatoes. They were both impressed that I know how to make my own noodles, and were floored at how quickly they cook compared to the kind one buys in boxes or bags in the supermarket. After eating I mixed up a quick batch of cookies, combining some butter, sugar, egg, and yoghurt with coconut flakes, flour, oat flour, and chocolate chips (I nibbled my share before adding the chips) and they all pronounced the cookies a success. It was a delightfully fun evening. They plan on attending dance again next week, adn we are going to so a small Alpine adventure on the weekend.

One additional clue that they are our kind of people: Crian has picked up a couple of books since arriving in Europe. One of them was on the shelf and our guest asked "is that the second book in the Eragon series?" It is--Crian had borrowed the first from a friend in Tassie before leaving, but didn't get a chance to read the next before he left, so he bought this one. Our friend was delighted to see it, since he'd read the first and was wanting to read the next, but until he finds a local job is hesitant to be book-shopping. So, of course, he's taken it home with him for the next couple of days. I guess we will have to check out the American Bookstore I saw by the Castle to see if they've got the first, since I haven't read those yet, having been way too busy finishing up my thesis when Crian borrowed it in Tassie.